


Let's Make A Deal

by DesertScribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Deal with a Devil, Demon deserted from the army of hell to become an artist, Human/Demon romance, M/M, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 06:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20305024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: Walt summons a demon.  The results don't turn out quite as he expected, but that's probably for the best.





	Let's Make A Deal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruis/gifts).

The instant Walt finished speaking the last syllable of the summoning incantation, there was a small electrical "pop" and the room was plunged into near darkness, with the only remaining light coming from the four votive candles Walt had used to mark the cardinal points of the exterior summoning sigil and from the tiny bit creeping in through the thin gap below the closed door behind him.

It must have been an LED bulb up there, judging by how it had failed. Only incandescent bulbs had any chance of surviving the combination of their usual electrical load and such a close range magical surge. At least it hadn't been a CFL, which would have straight up exploded. In addition to the immediate and obvious dangers of a sudden rain of melted plastic and glass, such an event would have contaminated his whole summoning area with invisible trace amounts of mercury. Such residue was a small health hazard in its own right, but even worse, it would cause all sorts of pain in the ass magical interference if he tried casting again in there without properly cleaning the area first.

However, before Walt had a chance to start castigating himself for stupidly forgetting the basic safety precaution of checking what kind of bulb was up there, the air within the summoning circle distorted in ways which could not be explained away by flickering candlelight or retinal afterimages, and then the demon appeared within the inner containment circle in a puff of smoke, just like the notes he had copied from his grandmother's second favorite grimoire said that it would. Walt thanked his lucky stars that the grimoire had also been correct about this particular spell not summoning anything particularly big.

The narrow storage room, little better than a walk-in cubby really, was not the ideal venue for trying to summon a demon, especially not for a beginner, but it was the best option Walt had at the moment. The main part of his apartment was open plan with floor to ceiling windows without any curtains. Under most circumstances that was a desirable feature which made the space feel light and airy and larger than it really was, but it was a little too public for Walt's current purposes. He was young and fit and proud enough of his good looks to not mind if any of his neighbors across the street happened to see him wandering around the place in his underwear from time to time, but the idea of them catching him trying to summon demons was another matter entirely.

The bathroom was the only other part of his home safe from prying eyes, but Walt had come home from a party completely shitfaced a few weeks ago and, in a fit of alcohol-soaked creativity, plastered every available surface with the hundreds of cartoon fish stickers that his sister had gotten him as a gag gift for his birthday and then hadn't yet gotten around to cleaning up any of it beyond scraping enough of them off the mirror to get a clear view of his face while he shaved. Walt didn't want any hypothetical demons getting an eyeful of that as their first impression of him, not if he wanted them to take him seriously.

Attempting to summon on campus would carry too big a risk of someone walking in and interrupting him partway through or, if he wanted a greater chance of privacy, would require breaking and entering after hours, which carried even bigger risks and consequences of being caught even if the summoning wasn't successful.

In a perfect world, his parent's house would have been the best place for Walt to do this. There were readymade containment circles etched deep into the stone floor of the basement, and the protective wards surrounding the whole area had been reinforced by enough generations of magic users that they would probably withstand an escape attempt by an Archduke of Hell. There was just the little problem that if Walt went slinking back there, then those same protective wards would immediately let his parents know about it, even if they were on vacation on the other side of the world at the time, and then they would immediately appear and want to have a Talk with him about his disappointing choice of eschewing magic as a career path and his even more disappointing choice of deciding to use it illegally to get ahead at college.

Walt really, _really_ didn't want to have to deal with any of that, hence his decision to perform his demon summoning ritual in his storage room. The fact that the summoning was successful on the first try was only a tiny bit of a surprise. Even though Walt had abandoned any intention of following in his parents' footsteps back in his mid-teens, he had always bristled at them classifying the strength of his casting average at best. If he ever got around to admitting to them what he had just done here, he could cite it as proof of how much they had underestimated his power, just as they tended to underestimate everything else about him.

The demon was more or less man-shaped from what Walt could see despite the bad lighting and the demon's truly unflattering baggy clothing, very nicely man-shaped in fact, with broad shoulders, muscular arms, wavy dark hair, and inhumanly (literally inhumanly, but in a good way) sharp cheekbones. The aforementioned unflattering clothing was liberally smeared with bloody-looking patches, as were the demon's (also nicely shaped, just like the rest of him) large hands, but there was probably only a fifty-fifty chance that it was only for show rather than an indication that Walt had interrupted him in the middle of actual torture or dismemberment. There was also something vaguely familiar about him, though Walt couldn't quite place where he might have seen the demon's face before, maybe one of those Who's Who compendiums of lesser hellions with old woodcut illustrations that were little better than caricature.

"Do you mind?" the demon growled in a velvety low baritone voice. "I was kinda in the middle of something important." Okay, so maybe the chances that Walt hadn't interrupted torture or dismemberment were significantly less than fifty percent. Also, the demon did not look at all impressed with Walt's summoning prowess, though by all rights he should have been. Not just anybody could yank a demon out of Hell solo without any awkward aborted partial materializations before achieving full manifestation, especially not on their first time ever using the spell. Though, Walt supposed the demon wouldn't have any way of knowing about that last part. With that in mind, Walt refused to let himself falter in the face of an unexpectedly sexy demon who did not properly appreciate a display magical strength even when he had one literally grab him by the tail and pull.

"I want to make a deal," Walt said, crossing his arms and trying to look as imposing as possible without looking like he was trying to look imposing. It would have been easier if the demon hadn't been several inches taller than him even when one ignored the extra half a foot added by the demon's ridged ivory-colored horns curving up and away from his hairline. Then again, Walt could see what looked like cloven hooves poking out below the ratty cuffs of those hideous baggy pants, which meant that the demon was standing digitigrade, which was basically cheating as far as Walt was concerned. Walt would have been plenty taller than the demon if he stood on tiptoes too.

"Of course you do," the demon grumbled. "Nobody ever summons their friendly neighborhood demon to invite them to a party, unless it's a party full of people they want dead. And, it that's what you're planning," the demon added, crossing his arms to mimic Walt's haughty posture (and the demon's arm muscles bulged _so_ much more alluringly when he did it than Walt could ever dream of managing), "then you're going to have to wait a while, unless the party's on a weeknight, because my weekends are booked solid for the rest of the semester. Also, I'm not an incubus, so if you're just looking to get laid then you'll need to at least buy me dinner and some drinks first. So, what do you want badly enough to interrupt both our nights for?"

Walt soundlessly opened and closed his mouth a couple of times without really noticing what he was doing. He had been planning to sell his soul for the artistic talent and skills that seemed to be taking him too long to develop on his own, but his mind had gotten hung up on the mention of getting laid. He was not ordinarily the type to be so desperate for sex, but he also had eyes and could appreciate a damn fine human-ish body when he saw one. Just the slow, sinuous swishing movements of the demon's tail, which Walt kept catching glimpses of out of the corner of his eye while trying to keep his attention fixed firmly on his face, were enough to send Walt's thoughts plunging into the gutter as he imagined all the possible things that could be done with it, and he hadn't even begun to consciously process the velvety looking leather folds of the demon's wings.

"Well?" the demon prompted after several more seconds of Walt's inarticulate silence.

"How about I buy you dinner and some drinks?" Walt blurted before common sense had a chance to prevail. Not that that was a likely risk, seeing as how it hadn't already stepped in back when the idea of summoning a demon to sell his soul to had first crossed his mind. In a way, maybe asking the demon out on a date instead was as close to common sense as Walt was ever going to get.

"Dinner and drinks?" The demon's expression did not change from its preexisting scowl, but the swishing of his tail grew a little livelier. The small fleshy spade shape at the tail's tip rippled like the motions of a miniature stingray, and, yeah, Walt definitely wanted to see what the demon could do with that in bed, or on the couch, or on the kitchen counter, or up against a wall, or just about anywhere really. Not in the shower, though, at least not until after he had gotten rid of those stupid fish stickers.

"Yeah, I'll buy you dinner and drinks," Walt said eagerly, warming to his subject, "and then, afterwards, we can come back here and Netflix and chill."

"And, just to be clear," the demon said, his face all business in the front while his tail was partying in the back, "when you say, 'Netflix and chill,' are you requesting that literally or metaphorically?"

"Whichever one you want?" Walt offered.

"In that case, we have ourselves a deal," the demon said. His eyes glowed pure white and he extended his right hand as far as he could without crossing the protective circle.

"Yes, we have a deal," Walt said and reached across the invisible line to shake the demon's proffered hand, formalizing and binding the deal. There was a shiver of dissipating magic in the air as the temporary wards were made redundant and released themselves. The candle flames shivered and flickered slightly but did not go out.

"Great!" the demon exclaimed, still holding on to Walt's hand. He was grinning now, widely enough for the candlelight to gleam off of the points of his teeth. "Just let me go cap my paints, clean my brushes, and take a shower, and then I'll be back before you know it!" Then the demon vanished, leaving Walt holding nothing but air. This time the candles did blow out, but Walt barely noticed.

"Cap your what?" he asked into the darkness.

As expected, there was no answer.

Feeling the gnawing sensation of knowing that he was missing something but not being able to figure out what, Walt fumbled around for the doorknob left-handed (his right hand was sticky) and let himself out of the storage room and back into the light of his apartment. He let his gaze roam around the living area, but nothing he saw sparked the mental connection necessary to latch onto whatever was bothering him and draw it up into conscious thought. It wasn't a sense of foreboding, more like the awkwardness of talking to someone at a party who you had supposedly met before but couldn't remember where or what their name was.

Walt had never gotten the demon's name, he realized. That meant that he couldn't even call his parents and hope he could talk them into looking up the demon for him without needing to explain why he wanted the information. Both the lack of information and the knowledge that he couldn't go to his parents for help even if he had wanted to were suddenly very worrisome, but before Walt could delve deeper into regrets and self-recriminations, there was a knock at the apartment door.

Walt looked through the peephole and saw the demon, wings and tail both held at a jaunty angles and wearing cleaner and much better fitting clothes now, waving and grinning back at him with the same smile he had directed at Walt only a minute or two before. The bright florescent lighting of the building's hallway did not make those teeth look any less pointy, but the way that the demon's skintight Henley showed off every bulge and valley of his pecs and abs was enough to make Walt ignore a lot of things. For a brief moment, the only thought in Walt's head was, _Shit, I haven't even combed my hair yet._

Then Walt opened the door and was struck by the incongruity of what he was seeing face to face not matching what he had seen through the peephole only a second earlier. The clothing was the same, as were the great torso and set of arms which it encased, and the man's basic face was the same, though the cheekbones were smoothed down to less impossible but still dramatic angles. The dark hair and the super pale probably-never-saw-the-sun-and-didn't-want-to skin was the same, but the wings and horns and tail were nowhere to be seen (and wasn't that a crying shame? A newly awakened part of Walt's libido wailed in the back of his mind) and the digitigrade stance had been replaced by feet that were human shaped to be wearing a pair of slightly scuffed canvas sneakers (and, yes, Walt was now the one who was several inches taller, crowed the childish competitive part of his personality which had been around forever).

"Shall we, Walt?" said the demon disguised as even more-familiar-looking-than-before human, asked.

"How do you know my name?" Walt asked. "Who _are_ you?"

"Your date?" The demon frowned, and looked pointedly down at himself and then back at Walt. "You do know this is just a glamour, right?" Walt's opinion of the building's security went up a notch at the realization that the peepholes came charmed to see through glamours, but that did nothing to address his current concern.

"Yes, but who are you?" Walt said.

The frown deepened into a scowl which was all too familiar even though this was the first time that Walt had seen it on the human version of the demon's face. "You really don't know," he said incredulously. The demon reached out and pushed one hand against Walt's chest to force him backwards into the apartment while using the other to grab Walt by the right wrist and hauled his arm up to wave his hand around in the suddenly narrow space between them, but Walt's gaze was fixed on the demon's eyes with occasional brief detours to glance down at his mouth as he spoke, so all Walt saw of his hand was a red blur. "How can you possibly not know?" He hooked the edge of the door with his foot as he passed it on his way into the apartment and kicked it closed, either for emphasis or just to give them a modicum of privacy against their voiced carrying down the hall to any of Walt's neighbors.

"I just used a generalized summoning spell to bring in any demon matching the basic parameters from the nearest node of Hell," Walt sputtered. "It's not like I called you up by name!"

"Are you shitting me?" At Walt's frantic head-shake of denial, the demon released his wrist with a frustrated growl and stalked off to flop down onto Walt's couch in an apparent sulk with a muttered, "Un-fucking-believable!"

"Um, what?" Walt asked. He felt like he had even less of a clue about what was going on now than he did before.

"You're an absolute dumbass," the demon said, "and it's a good thing your spell didn't bring you anyone who was still actually affiliated with Hell, or right now you'd be totally screwed, and not in the mutually enjoyable way like I had been planning to do later tonight."

"What?" Walt repeated. Because, seriously, what?!?

"Look at your hand," the demon said.

Walt looked at his hand. It was covered in dark red smears from shaking hands with the demon earlier, but now that he was paying attention under good lighting, it didn't look quite right to be blood. It looked more like… paint?

"I didn't pull you out of Hell, did I?" Walt said slowly, as the mental pieces finally began to fall together.

"More like you pulled me out of the student studio spaces on the other side of campus," the demon said wryly from his place on the couch. "You have no idea who I am even though I've been in something like half your classes this semester." When Walt failed to provide any kind of a non-idiotic reply to that or any kind of a reply at all, the demon gave a bitter laugh and said, "Fuck, it's a good thing you're cute, Walt, or I'd totally be looking for a loophole to get out of our deal right now."

Deal? Oh, right, they were both still magically bound to go on their date together and then either fuck or watch Netflix together, even though Walt had already completely ruined everything. Walt wondered if there was any chance that the situation wasn't completely unsalvageable yet.

"Maybe we could start over?" Walt suggested. The demon gave him a skeptical look but did not protest, so Walt walked over to the couch, held out his paint-stained, and said, "Hi, I'm Walt. What's your major?"

The demon rolled his eyes and gave a small derisive snort through his nose, but he accepted Walt's hand, gave it a firm but not crushing handshake, and said, "Hi, Walt, I'm," and he gargled out a string of mostly consonants with the occasional diphthong which could probably be pronounceable by a human tongue after a little bit of practice, but Walt wouldn't want to bet money on that until he had gotten a chance to try it for himself, "but you can call me Hector Hellman. I'm an art major, and I know that somehow you are too being incapable of drawing or painting the proper way for a human head to connects to the body. It's called a neck, and someday you should figure out how one works."

That last part stung because it was true, but Walt had to defend himself anyway. "Why do you think I was trying to summon a demon to sell my soul to in the first place?" he demanded, which earned him an even more skeptical look than before.

"Seriously?"

"I mean, not just that specific problem, but better skills in general." It was a weak excuse, and Walt knew it, but at least now the demon, Hector, was looking a little bit amused instead of hurt and angry.

"I hope you realize that it's better for you in the long run to just put in your ten thousand hours of practice like the rest of us," Hector said, sitting up a little straighter and making an odd squirming motion which took Walt a moment to realize was probably a matter of readjusting invisible wings and tail into more comfortable positions. "If not, you really are a hopelessly irredeemable dumbass."

"Says the demon supposedly no longer affiliated with Hell but walking around calling himself _Hector Hellman_," Walt said, not bothering to deny the accusation but willing to attempt a deflection from it. "What were _you_ thinking?"

Hector shrugged. "I thought it was funny at the time, and then couldn't think of anything better, so it stuck. Maybe I'm kind of a dumbass too."

"A really good looking dumbass," Walt said. Then the final puzzle piece clicked in his mind. (Took it goddamned long enough to get there.) "Especially when you keep your hair tied back like this instead of letting it all fall in your face like a sheepdog," he added, having finally figured out how he had managed not to notice someone so good looking sharing half his classes.

"Right back at you, Walt, minus the hair part, because you always look like you must spend two hours getting it perfect every morning. If you'd just spent all that extra time and effort on your art instead of your hair, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now, not that I have too many objections to that aside from that one part where you were a complete asshole. At least you seem like the kind of guy who might be willing to put the effort in to make it up to me," Hector said, and by now, his grin was back in full, which Walt took as an invitation to drop down onto the couch next to him. And if Walt just so happened to pick the side of Hector which let him trap Hector's invisible tail against the back of couch and feel its muscles flex against his ass as Hector continues to slowly swish its far end around like some kind of overgrown cat, then that was nobody's business but his and Hector's.

"So," Walt said as casually as possible and settling in against Hector's side, "where did you have in mind for our dinner date?"

"Can't say that I's thought about it at all," Hector said just as casually, not showing any interest in complaining about Walt's sudden close proximity, quite the opposite, in fact, given how Hector wrapped the free part of his tail around Walt and continued its idle motions right on top of Walt's crotch, all while keeping his face the perfect picture of innocence. "I expected you to pick someplace."

It did not take very long to elicit the intended reaction, which, given the shift in tail motions to provide maximum teasing across the new topography of Walt's tented pants, Hector surely noticed without needing to look down.

Walt bit back a groan of pleasure as Hector seemingly bent the spade-shaped tip of his still invisible tail to make it feel like a pair of lips was pressing kisses over his clothed erection, and Walt couldn't help wondering once again just what all Hector could do with that talented tail. Sexual uses for such a dexterous extra appendage aside, Walt could imagine him maybe holding a brush and painting with it and no doubt looking sexy as hell in the process. If he didn't do that already, then Walt wanted to talk him into making the attempt. That would have to wait, though, because Walt had a more pressing concern on his mind which Hector and his tail were making more pressing by the minute.

"I was thinking," Walt began.

"Were you?" Hector asked without interrupting the motions of his tail in the slightest. "I'll have to try harder then." Even while wearing the human-looking glamour, the teeth he showed off were just overly sharp enough to give his grin an alluring hint of danger.

"I was thinking that we said we'd go out and eat and then come back here," Walt said, hurrying his words some to be certain to get them out at all, "but we don't have to go out first if we both agree to change the order of things."

"It's a deal," Hector said, and instead of a handshake, this time they sealed it with a kiss.

As it turned out, they never got around to going out for dinner that night, due to being first otherwise engaged and then later too worn out to bother. However, breakfast and drinks the next morning turned out to be a perfect substitution. They could try a dinner date again later, no magically binding deal required this time.

**The End**


End file.
